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* [TUHS] Troff to ps
@ 2020-07-26 14:56 Will Senn
  2020-07-26 15:31 ` arnold
                   ` (2 more replies)
  0 siblings, 3 replies; 24+ messages in thread
From: Will Senn @ 2020-07-26 14:56 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: TUHS main list

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All,

So... I've moved on from v7 to 2.11bsd - shucks, vi and tar and co. just 
work there and everything else seems to be similar enough for what I'm 
interested in anyway. So yay, I won't be pestering y'all about vi 
anymore :). One the other hand, now I'm interested in printing the docs.

2.11bsd comes with docs in, of all places, /usr/doc. In there are 
makefiles for making the docs - ok, make nroff will make ascii docs, and 
troff will make troff? docs using Ossana's 'original' troff. So, after 
adding -t to it so it didn't complain about 'typesetter busy', I got no 
errors. I mounted a tape, tar'ed my .out file and untar'ed it on my 
macbook (did it for the nroff and troff output). Then I hit the first 
snag, groff -Tps -ms troff.out > whatever.ps resulted in cannot adjust 
line and cannot break line errors and groff -Tps -ms nroff.out > 
whatever.ps resulted in a bunch of double vision. I seem to recall doing 
this in v6 and it working ok (at least for nroff).

My questions:
1. Is there a troff to postcript conversion utility present in a stock 
2.11 system (or even patch level 4xx system)?
2. Is there a way to build postscript directly on the system?
3. Is there an alternative modern way to get to ps or pdf output from 
the nroff/troff that 2.11 has?

I'm still digging into the nroff stuff as that may be just minor diffs 
between ancient nroff macros and "modern" macros or even just errors 
(.sp -2 rather than .sp or .sp -1, .in -2 instead of .in +2), etc. 
Although, the files display ok in 2.11bsd using nroff -ms nroff.out...

Thanks,

Will

-- 
GPG Fingerprint: 68F4 B3BD 1730 555A 4462  7D45 3EAA 5B6D A982 BAAF


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^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 24+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Troff to ps
@ 2020-07-26 23:37 Norman Wilson
  2020-07-27 15:08 ` Jaap Akkerhuis
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 24+ messages in thread
From: Norman Wilson @ 2020-07-26 23:37 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs

Nemu Nusquam:

  When was dpost born?

=====

CSTR 97, A Typesetter-Independent TROFF by Brian W Kernighan
was issued in 1981 and revised the next year.  So that's the
earliest possible date.

I vaguely remember the existence of Postscript support in
general, including at least one Apple Laserwriter kicking
around somewhere, starting at some point during my time at
1127 in the latter 1980s.  There was even a Postscript
display engine that ran on 5620 terminals under mux, though
it wasn't normally used for troff previewing because the
troff-specific proofer was faster (mainly, I think, it
didn't send nearly as much data down the serial line to
the terminal).

My personal snapshot of V10, and the TUHS archive copy,
include dpost; see src/cmd/postscript/dpost.  Everything
in the postscript directory came from USG, who had
packaged everything troff into a separately-licensed
Documenter's Workbench package.  That may have made us
exclude it from the officially-distributed V8 tape and
V9 snapshots.  In any case, the only V9 snapshot I know
of offhand (which is in Warren's archive) has no dpost.

Both my copy of V10 and the TUHS copy show dpost's
source files with dates in 1991, but it was certainly
there earlier if I used it in New Jersey (I left in
mid-1990).  Dpost is documented in man8/postscript.8;
my copy of that file is dated October 1989.

Digging around in documents available on the web,
I found a bundle of DWB 2.0 docs:

http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/att/unix/Documentors_Workbench_1989/UNIX_System_V_Documentors_Workbench_Reference_Manual_1989.pdf

It's a scanned-image PDF so I can't search it by
machine, but it includes such things as listings of
the source-code directory and manifests of various
binary distributions, and dpost doesn't appear anywhere
I can see.  As the URL implies, the docs seem to
be dated 1989.  So maybe dpost wasn't part of the
product until DWB 3.0; but maybe we in Research got
an early copy of the postscript stuff (I think bwk
was in regular communication with the USG-troff
folks), perhaps in 1989.

I confess I've lost track of the original question
that spawned this thread, but if it is whether
dpost is easily back-ported to PDP-11 UNIX, I don't
think that's likely without a good bit of work.
It would very likely require a post-1980-type C
compiler, since it was written in the late 1980s.
It might or might not fit on a PDP-11; I don't
remember whether USG's system still officially
ran there by the late 1980s.

Norman Wilson
Toronto ON

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 24+ messages in thread
* Re: [TUHS] Troff to ps
@ 2020-07-28 11:33 Doug McIlroy
  0 siblings, 0 replies; 24+ messages in thread
From: Doug McIlroy @ 2020-07-28 11:33 UTC (permalink / raw)
  To: tuhs

> There was quite some communication between Peter Nilson (npn, known
> for picasso) and bwk.
In the interest of accuracy npn's full name is Nils-Peter Nelson.
He honchoed the Bell Labs Cray and originated <string.h>.

Doug

^ permalink raw reply	[flat|nested] 24+ messages in thread

end of thread, other threads:[~2021-01-28 12:59 UTC | newest]

Thread overview: 24+ messages (download: mbox.gz / follow: Atom feed)
-- links below jump to the message on this page --
2020-07-26 14:56 [TUHS] Troff to ps Will Senn
2020-07-26 15:31 ` arnold
2020-07-26 15:35   ` arnold
2020-07-26 16:15     ` Clem Cole
2020-07-26 17:11       ` arnold
2020-07-26 18:03         ` Clem Cole
2021-01-27  5:24           ` Greg A. Woods
2021-01-28  0:19             ` John Gilmore
2021-01-28  1:25               ` Clem Cole
2021-01-28  1:59                 ` Larry McVoy
2021-01-28  3:19                 ` John Gilmore
2021-01-28 12:58                 ` Clem Cole
2020-07-26 19:05   ` Nemo Nusquam
2020-07-26 22:39     ` Noel Hunt
2020-07-27  5:31     ` arnold
2020-07-27  9:19       ` Jaap Akkerhuis
2020-07-27 11:07         ` Brad Spencer
2020-07-27 15:58   ` Will Senn
2020-07-26 15:33 ` Clem Cole
2020-07-27 15:53   ` Will Senn
2020-07-26 18:09 ` Al Kossow
2020-07-26 23:37 Norman Wilson
2020-07-27 15:08 ` Jaap Akkerhuis
2020-07-28 11:33 Doug McIlroy

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